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On Friday, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatened to continue cracking down on protesters who have risen up against his regime, calling them “vandals” working for the Americans. Years of Western sanctions and internal mismanagement have caused Iran’s economy to crater; in response to increasing domestic anger, Iran’s government has cut off access to the internet, and protests have been met violently by security forces. (Rights groups have reported dozens of deaths; a doctor told Time magazine that six hospitals in Tehran alone had recorded more than two hundred protester deaths.) The protests are only the latest problem facing Khamenei’s regime, which had much of its leadership assassinated by Israel during a twelve-day war last June. (President Trump also ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites in June.) Meanwhile, Iran’s network of allies across the Middle East has been severely weakened. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad fled the country after a revolution, which Iran had helped bloodily pacify, finally achieved its goal. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s presence and influence have shrunk following Israeli attacks over the past several years.

I recently spoke by phone with Fatemeh Shams, an associate professor of Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a feminist activist and, since 2009, has been an Iranian exile. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what has made this round of protests against the Iranian regime unique, how the regime’s humiliation by Israel has weakened its standing at home, and why the crackdown on protesters might get even more brutal than in earlier eras.

We talked in 2022 during protests in Iran that were focussed on the hijab. What do you think has changed since that previous round of major protests, and since the other rounds of protests we have seen in Iran in the past couple of decades?

The main thing that is important to keep in mind, and this is a significant change, is that it has become essentially impossible for the majority of the population to make ends meet. I don’t mean just the working classes or the lower classes. Even the majority of the middle class, who were still able to cover the cost of living until last year, are almost completely paralyzed at the moment. The cost of living has significantly increased, and one reason for that is the plummeting value of the country’s currency, which has led to an inability of merchants and traders to import goods from abroad. Then there is the extreme inflation and the lack of basic foods. My mom was just telling me that it has become hard to get cooking oil. The price of chicken has gone way up. Many small businesses have been shut down or are completely unable to operate. The government has been unable to manage the situation, and basically the society cannot survive anymore. This is a riot of a starving population. This is a riot for survival. Society cannot survive without being able to manage the cost of living.

The protests are being met by brutal crackdowns: the population was already enraged. Social freedom has been extremely limited since the regime came to power and particularly in the past couple of decades. And then there is the humiliation that the regime was met with over twelve days of war with Israel last year.

Would you say that this is the broadest discontent since the 1979 revolution, when Iran’s monarchy, led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown by Islamic clerics?

Absolutely. I think this is an explosion. This is a moment where it’s not about social freedom anymore. It’s not about bodily autonomy. It’s about something that is much more widespread. The 2022 protests, which were unprecedented protests in their own right, were intersectional in the way that they brought people of different ethnic groups, genders, and political factions together at the beginning for the bodily autonomy of women, but then it immediately, very quickly, basically moved toward the toppling of the regime and the equality for different ethnic groups in the society. This time, though, it’s about society reaching a dead end. And when I say reaching a dead end, I mean that for the people, for the population. It’s a matter of how to be able to survive and to protect their families and to put bread and food on the table when basic goods are impossible to buy or find.

I would imagine that previous protests, which were about women’s rights or ethnic minorities, and which would sometimes be characterized as a battle between hard-liners versus moderates—all of these types of protests spark opposition, whether from men, from more conservative elements in society, or from the ethnic majority. I know you said that there was a lot of intersectional stuff happening, but I still imagine that those types of protests bring with them some cleavages that a protest in response to economic disaster would not.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s why these are at such a large scale. We didn’t have this large scale of protests in any round of protests in the past in Iran. I don’t know if you have looked at the videos that are coming out of certain cities, like, for example, Mashhad. That’s where I come from. It’s my home town. I grew up there and also it’s the first strategic city for Khamenei in the sense that there is a sacred shrine there, and the expansion of that shrine has been part of his ideological project. I have been shocked as a Mashhadi citizen.

Previous protests were not as big there?

No, not at all. And this is a huge blow to the regime because in Mashhad you see security forces in all corners of the city. Khamenei often gives speeches there laying out his plans for the next year. This is the last place that they would have imagined such a large-scale protest.

The slogans are really important. In the last round of protests, in the previous round, the main slogan was “Woman, Life, Freedom.” It was coming from grassroots collectives of Kurdish women. Now we are hearing slogans about “death to the dictator,” which target the core of the regime. We have also never had such large-scale strikes. Strikes are something that had an important role in toppling the Pahlavi regime in 1979. And, in the previous round of protests, we saw that the Kurdish areas were very active in the strikes. Some activists were shouting that the rest of the country, including Tehran, should join their strikes, but it didn’t happen.

This time, though, the unrest started in Ala’addin Bazaar—a well-known shopping center in Tehran, which primarily sells mobile phones and digital equipment—and it quickly spread to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. The merchants in Ala’addin Bazaar are considered conservative, religiously speaking. They’ve never protested in the past. And this is a place for electronic equipment, mobile phones, computers—this is something about trading and being able to import and so forth. So it started in the heart of the capital, then it spread to other areas of Iran, and then seven major Kurdish parties basically came together and announced that they were joining the strike.

You mentioned the Twelve-Day War with Israel. It was significant the degree to which Iran was humiliated by first Israel and then the United States, and the degree of military power that Israel seems to have displayed over Iran. I would imagine that just from a sheer nationalist perspective, anyone watching their own country get embarrassed like that would be outraged at the regime, too.

I think we have to be very careful in addressing this question because I think there was a lot of misinterpretation in terms of how Iranians responded to the war. Iranians were obviously against the Israeli actions. The majority were enraged about this, but at the same time we have to be careful—when they’re enraged about an assault on Iranian soil, it’s not about defending the regime. This is about the population that is stuck between a murderous criminal mafia that has taken over the country and, on the other hand, Israel and the United States, who follow their own interests. So they’re not defending the regime by condemning Israel.

Humiliation is something that we have to take into account. Many military commanders were killed. I think one of the things that people realized is that this regime is not even able to protect its own high-ranking officials. If they cannot protect their own officials and military bases, how are they going to protect the nation? How are they going to protect their own people? The leader of the country was hiding for twelve days. People were essentially left on their own to figure out how to defend themselves. People could not leave certain cities. They were blocked inside their cities without having any shelter to run into.

So I think the war led to this complete lack of trust in the ability of the government to protect the nation, in the case of an invasion, under a regime that has been basically attacking Israel, attacking America, and isolating the whole nation in the name of national integrity. I’ve been hearing repeatedly, especially after the U.S. strikes and during the war, that people believe the nuclear program has caused more economic devastation and minor international isolation than any success it might have brought. The immense costs associated with the program have only worsened the economic situation, leading to a more stifling environment. Unlike the regime, the people do not view this as a national interest and are instead in favor of negotiating a deal with the U.S. to lift the sanctions. There have been negotiations and discussions within the government regarding this issue, but Khamenei does not seem willing to back down.

What about Iran’s regional standing, which has weakened in the past couple of years after the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell and was replaced by a Sunni government, and after Hezbollah, the Iranian ally in Lebanon, was weakened by Israel? Is there some sense among the population that Iran’s regional position is weaker? Have you seen that fact manifesting itself in the way people within Iran are talking about politics and protest?

I think it is part of that humiliation that we’ve been discussing, and I think a major aspect of it was all these empty gestures and speeches by Khamenei. He was always talking about the “axis of resistance” and the defenders of Haram, which is how he referred to the soldiers that he was sending to Syria to help the Assad regime. All of this is gone and all of it was gone in such a short period of time. And I think Khamenei did not really expect this level of assault and this level of loss on a regional level. On the other hand, I think what’s really important is to take into account the Iranian people’s grievances over this matter.

One of the things that I hear a lot from people who are not even political, like just ordinary citizens, is that we are starving to death, so why is our money being sent to Hezbollah or to Hamas, for example. This financial support has been, by the way, openly announced. It’s not a secret. They’re sending money and they’re very open about it. They’re bluntly talking about financing the “axis of resistance” and not only financing it but also creating it—they were the ones who created it. And there has been mass dissatisfaction among the people who consider it a form of betrayal, putting them in a very precarious and fragile situation security-wise by exposing them to war and to invasion and to starvation and to sanctions.

I also think something that we need to think about and to take into account is that Iran has been the sole major regional ally of Palestine. Since the beginning of the revolution, pro-Palestine rhetoric has been one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s identity, with talk that we are going to conquer Jerusalem, we are going to free Palestine. Ayatollah Khomeini used to say that the path to Jerusalem goes through Karbala. And that was the slogan for the Iran-Iraq War—this sort of expansionist idea of, O.K., we want to go to free Palestine and free Jerusalem. And I think what happened in Gaza over the past two years, as horrific as it was, and there is no doubt that it was a genocide—it weakened the position of the Islamic Republic, although the world and particularly some post-colonial sorts don’t want to accept that. And they’re keeping silent at this moment because they think that by weakening the Iranian regime, the situation in Palestine will get worse. But with what happened in Gaza I think the Islamic Republic proved that they can do nothing but create even more chaos in the region.

I would imagine the sentiment among the people of Iran is very sympathetic to Palestinians. That makes it all the more striking when you say that there’s tremendous anger that the Islamic Republic has been offering support for Hamas and Hezbollah while things are out of control at home.

Yeah. And one of the slogans that has been chanted again this time, which I heard for the first time back in 2009, is “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.” I think people are just done with these regional interventions and expansionist ideological plot that both Khomeini and Khamenei have had in mind for forty-seven years. Their main concern is, How are we going to survive?

Whatever Iran’s hopes about trying to help the Palestinians, the country where Iran has been most active in the region, with a calamitous humanitarian cost, has been Syria, and after spending an untold number of soldiers and dollars there, the Assad regime completely crumbled. And the new Syrian regime probably will not be too friendly to Iran going forward. You wonder if people in Iran are asking why all this was done.

Yeah, exactly. And when Assad fled the country to Russia, there has been—even now, as we speak, there are rumors inside Iran, outside Iran, that Khamenei is also going to flee there. I don’t believe that this is going to happen. I think Khamenei wants to stay in Iran and wants to be “martyred” or “killed” or whatever. He will never leave Iranian soil in my opinion, but the fact that there are rumors like this gives us a really interesting clue about how people are thinking about his fate, and the closest example to that of course is what happened to Assad.

The regime has shown a real willingness to be brutal when it comes to responding to protests. And I’m sure it’s no different this time. Does the worrying situation the regime finds itself in regionally make you think that it will be even less willing to compromise, that it will go all out to maintain its power no matter what?

I’m extremely concerned. And on Friday morning Khamenei basically said that all people who are in the streets are a bunch of rioters and are agents of Israel and America and they should be put in their place. So it’s obvious that they’re extremely scared and desperate. I think the internet blackout is a sign of the desperation on the side of the state because they don’t want the news to get out. In 2019, when they shut down the internet, more than fifteen hundred people were killed.

What makes them much more worried and concerned about the possibility of their survival this time is the lack of regional allies. Bashar Assad is no longer there. They have almost no control over Lebanon. The Iranian President, Masoud Pezeshkian, recently said that the current economic situation is no longer under control. The crackdown on the protesters is going to be much more brutal.

I am also concerned about what’s going to happen in the prisons, because usually the main crackdown and killing and torture happen behind closed doors there. In the past couple of years, the number of executions in Iran has been unprecedented. Just in the past year, some two thousand people have been executed. And one of the main charges, especially since the Twelve-Day War, has been collaboration with Israel. We don’t know whether these sorts of accusations are even true. But we may see much more brutal consequences for protesters than we have seen in the past. ♦

In 2012, voters in Wyoming were asked to approve on three changes to the state constitution: to preserve the right to hunt, fish, and trap; to expand the power of certain judicial employees; and to establish citizens’ authority to determine their own health-care choices. Billed as the Health Care Freedom Amendment, the measure was designed as a rebuke to the Affordable Care Act, the federal health-care law that had been enacted two years earlier and largely upheld by the Supreme Court that summer. Critics of Obamacare had asserted that it would usher in “death panels” and that its mandate that individuals purchase health insurance infringed on personal freedom. The Wyoming amendment provided that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.” The measure was largely a “message amendment” with little practical impact, according to Robert Keiter, the leading expert on the state’s constitution. Still, it passed overwhelmingly, with seventy-six per cent in favor.

Now enshrined as Article 1, Section 38, the provision has become an unlikely savior of abortion rights. Wyoming is the reddest state in the nation; a place where President Donald Trump won reëlection in 2024 with 71.6 per cent of the vote, and the Wyoming Supreme Court is composed entirely of justices appointed by a Republican governor. (The most recent Democratic governor left office in 2011.) Yet in a long-awaited ruling on Tuesday, the Court, splitting 4–1, struck down two laws, passed in 2023, that imposed a near-total ban on the procedure. One, the Life Is a Human Right Act, barred almost all abortions; the other, the first of its kind in the country, made it illegal to dispense or use abortion medication. Both laws, the justices concluded, violated the “very specific language” of Wyoming’s anti-Obamacare amendment. They unanimously rejected the state’s argument that abortion is not a form of health care, and that, as a result, the amendment did not apply. Pregnancy, the majority said, poses significant medical risks, and abortions “are medical procedures performed or administered by qualified medical professionals.” Therefore, “the phrase ‘health care’ includes abortion care and that the decision whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy is a ‘health care decision.’ ” The majority likewise dismissed the state’s claim that the intention of the voters—they thought they were taking a poke at Obamacare, not protecting abortion rights—should be taken into account. “The plain meaning of the provision controls, and we are not at liberty to read restrictions into that language,” the majority observed.

Another part of the amendment grants the legislature power to “determine reasonable and necessary restrictions” on health care “to protect the health and general welfare of the people.” But the majority said that that provision could not be interpreted in a way that would effectively undo the individual right to make health-care decisions. A fourth justice, concurring, said the state had failed to prove that the abortion restrictions were “reasonable and necessary.” The dissenting justice, Kari Jo Gray, focussed on that same provision, relying on it to find the laws were justified by the legislature’s interest in “preserving prenatal life at all stages of development.”

Wyoming’s explicit protection of the right to make health-care decisions appears to be unique, according to the opinion. But the ruling has implications beyond the state, reflecting the increased significance of state courts and state constitutional protections at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is cutting back on federal constitutional rights. In neighboring Montana, for example, the state constitution explicitly guarantees the right to privacy, and the state Supreme Court has repeatedly cited that provision in striking down various abortion restrictions. (In 2024, Montana voters approved a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion.)

The Wyoming ruling is hardly the end of the abortion battle, of course. The state’s legislature is split not so much between Republicans and Democrats—there are just two Democrats in the thirty-one-member Senate and six in the sixty-two-member House of Representatives—as it is between traditional Republicans and a more extreme contingent, members of the Freedom Caucus. The latter are increasingly gaining the upper hand; in 2025, the Freedom Caucus gained a majority in the Wyoming House, marking the first time the group had won control over a state legislative chamber. Following the Wyoming Supreme Court ruling, the state’s governor, Mark Gordon, a Republican of the more traditional camp, called on the legislature, which is to convene in February, to put a constitutional amendment restricting abortion rights on the November ballot; one proposal has already been filed. Yet it’s not at all certain that such an amendment would pass; Wyoming conservatism has a significant libertarian streak, and private polling in the state has shown that a majority of voters oppose eliminating the right to abortion. An anti-abortion amendment was last on the ballot in 1994, and it failed spectacularly, with only thirty-nine per cent of voters supporting it. (One of the justices who participated in Tuesday’s ruling, Kate Fox, represented the Wyoming National Abortion Rights Action League in an effort to keep that measure off the ballot.)

Freedom Caucus members could try other, more sweeping approaches to rein in what they consider to be an out-of-control court. They could push to reduce the size of the court, from five to three. (Fox, one of the justices in the majority, has retired—she was allowed to rule in the case because it was argued while she was still in office—and has been replaced by the state’s former attorney general, so a strategically shrunken court could restore an abortion ban.) Or they could move to change the method for Supreme Court appointments. Under the current merit-selection system, the governor chooses justices from among nominees recommended by a commission of lawyers and citizens; new justices stand for retention election after the first year and every eight years thereafter. There has already been talk among Freedom Caucus members of a switch to electing justices, which would eliminate the insulation from partisan politics. A Wyoming Freedom Caucus post on X after the ruling was unsparing about the court—and ominous about the future. “This is what happens when you let a weak Governor @GovernorGordon appoint weak judges unchecked: woke attorneys with an unpopular agenda that would never get them elected legislating from the bench,” the group said. “We will never give up the fight to protect innocent preborn life.” ♦

There aren’t many moments in Donald Trump’s political career that could be called highlights. But one occurred during the 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump addressed the prickly issue of the Iraq War. It had been a “big, fat mistake,” he charged. And the politicians who started it? “They lied.”

The audience hated this. Trump’s fellow-debaters Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio argued that George W. Bush—Jeb’s brother—had kept the country safe. Trump plowed on loudly through the booing. It was as if an “angry Code Pink-style protester” had crashed the Republican debate, the journalist Michael Grunwald wrote.

Trump hadn’t stood against the Iraq War from the start, as he has frequently claimed. (When asked, in the run-up to the invasion, whether he supported it, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”) But by 2004 he truly was opposed. He scoffed at the notion that the war would achieve anything. What was the point of “people coming back with no arms and legs” and “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces?” he asked. “All of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.”

Skepticism came easily to Trump, who had long been hostile to mainstream foreign policy. He made his political début, in 1987, by taking out full-page ads in several papers to complain of Washington’s “monumental spending” on defense for allies like Japan and Saudi Arabia. The foundations of U.S. supremacy since 1945—the aid packages, alliances, trade pacts, and basing arrangements that make up what the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls the “symphony of power”—have all seemed to Trump like a colossal waste.

Critics have called Trump an isolationist. Given the unconcealed delight he takes in dropping bombs on foreign lands (seven countries in 2025 alone), that can’t be right. A better diagnosis is that Trump doesn’t think the United States should seek to superintend global affairs, to take responsibility for the operation of the system. “American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country,” his recently released National Security Strategy explains. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”

At times, Trump has veered oddly close to the left, which has opposed trade deals (“neoliberalism”), military interventions (“warmongering”), the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus (“the Blob”), and the U.S. policing of the planet (“empire”). In his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton, he scored points by spotlighting her support of the Iraq War. “In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said last year, “and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

What distinguishes Trump from the left, of course, are his narrow nationalism and his love of raw force. “I’m the most militaristic person there is,” he has boasted. He relabelled the Department of Defense the Department of War, and appointed a Secretary, Pete Hegseth, who has promised to give “America’s warriors” the freedom to “kill people and break things.” Forget the symphony of power; Trump just wants to crash the cymbals.

Trump’s second term has been cacophonous with threats—to acquire Greenland, ethnically cleanse Gaza, make a state of Canada, throw the world economy into convulsions. This is a self-conscious flight from principles toward what he calls the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”

Hence this past weekend’s assault on Venezuela, in which U.S. forces launched air strikes on Caracas and nabbed the head of state, President Nicolás Maduro. (At least a hundred people were killed, local authorities say.) Trump claims that his goal is to punish Maduro for heading a “vast criminal network” that has brought “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.” But this is hard to swallow. The drug that is killing people, fentanyl, is almost entirely produced in Mexico, and the drug Venezuela does play a (minor) part in transporting, cocaine, goes mainly from there to Europe. Also, didn’t Trump just pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran President, who had been sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison for conspiring to import four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States?

The pretext frayed further as Trump started speaking covetously of Venezuela’s oil. But who needs pretexts? Trump has spurned the sort of global influence that required the appearance of fairness. He favors instead the power of the bully, which is best flexed by arbitrary attacks. The message these send is clear: You could be next.

Even Venezuelans thrilled to see Maduro gone have reason to be unnerved. It’s as if China had bombed Quantico, placed Trump in shackles, and whisked him to Shanghai for trial. No matter how much some people in the United States loathe Trump, they would, at minimum, have questions.

It’s hard not to think, in this moment, of George W. Bush. He spoke forcefully against “nation-building” at one of his debates with Al Gore, in 2000. “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, We do it this way, so should you,” he explained. Even as he went to war after 9/11, he plainly hoped to prevail through air strikes. Only when these failed to achieve their desired ends did he launch, in Afghanistan and Iraq, precisely the sort of protracted, bloody, and unpopular occupations he’d warned against.

Venezuela could become Trump’s Iraq. Once again, a U.S. President is railing against “terrorists,” eying oil reserves, flouting international law, and hunting down foreign dictators on factually dubious grounds. And, once again, fantasies of surgical strikes are yielding to messy realities. Watching Trump announce Maduro’s capture, you could almost see the mission creep happening in real time. After glorying in the military operation, Trump contemplated its aftermath. “We’re not gonna just do this with Maduro, then leave,” he said. There might be a “second wave” of attacks. Either way, the United States would have to “run the country” and “rebuild their whole infrastructure.” Trump was, he declared, “not afraid of boots on the ground.”

A reporter asked: How does running Venezuela put America first? “I think it is because we wanna surround ourself with good neighbors,” Trump answered. Speaking of which, “Cuba is gonna be something we’ll end up talking about.” The next day, he expanded his threats to include Colombia.

And so it begins. The press conference could have used a dash of 2016-era Trump. Someone to shout, “They’re lying,” and “This is a big, fat mistake.” ♦

In one of the pivotal moments in “Maurice,” E. M. Forster’s early-twentieth-century novel of homosexual love, the book’s titular protagonist—an upper-class young stockbroker battling secret gay desires—arrives at the British Museum to confront Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper with whom he’s had sex. Fearing blackmail and attempting to deny his true leanings, Maurice has been fending off Alec’s advances since their encounter, and now, offended at being rebuffed, Alec has been threatening to publicly expose him. As the two wander around the museum—one pressuring, the other deflecting—the novel portrays their professed enmity as underscored by the force of attraction, even of love. “They would peer at a goddess or vase, and then move at a single impulse, and their unison was the stranger because on the surface they were at war,” Forster writes. “Alec recommenced his hints—horrible, reptilian—but somehow they did not pollute the intervening silences, and Maurice failed to get afraid or angry . . . . When he chose to reply their eyes met, and his smile was sometimes reflected on the lips of his foe. The belief grew that the actual situation was a blind—a practical joke, almost—and concealed something real, that either desired.”

Forster’s novel may have been written in 1913 (and published, posthumously, in 1971), but its portrayal of Alec and Maurice’s inability to openly articulate their love remains evergreen. This was what struck me as I watched “Heated Rivalry,” a deliciously enjoyable series that began airing in late November on the small Canadian streaming platform Crave, and, simultaneously, on HBO Max, where it quickly became a huge, unexpected hit. (It’s currently the most-watched non-animated show acquired by HBO Max since the platform’s launch, in 2020.) “Heated Rivalry,” which is written and directed by Jacob Tierney, and based on a romance novel of the same name by Rachel Reid, takes place, largely chronologically, between the years 2008 and 2017. Over its six episodes, it tells the story of two secretly gay athletes in the highly masculinist world of pro hockey: Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams), a half-Asian Canadian who plays for Montreal, and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), a Russian who plays for Boston. (Williams and Storrie are shatteringly hunky, and, though quite unknown when the series began airing, have since turned into media sensations, appearing in the past couple of weeks on seemingly every single TV show, podcast, awards ceremony, magazine, and website in North America.) After first meeting in the lead-up to their rookie seasons, clean-cut Shane and bad-boy Ilya become the captains of their respective teams and begin to carry on an intermittent love affair on the D.L., while also nurturing an intense rivalry on the ice.

Shane and Ilya’s antagonism is predicated on their direct competition as sportsmen. But, as is the case with Maurice and Alec in Forster’s novel, there’s also something about their overt hostility that is fundamental to their closeted love. When attraction cannot manifest publicly, its passion can only be portrayed as its opposite, and the violent interactions between the hard-bodied pair, who slam and check each other again and again in the rink, are part of this phenomenon. (This doubling is also fodder for comedy on the show: Shane’s mother, who is clueless about her son’s sexual activities, professes her dislike toward his foe by declaring, at one point, “Imagining he’s better than you? Fuck. Him. Right up the butt!”)

This public enmity means, too, that the pair’s attraction and love must be conveyed underhandedly, through a language of half-hidden signals. To try to tell if someone likes you—if someone might even want to have sex with you and, if so, when, and what that encounter might be like, and, once it’s over, when and how it might be repeated—can be one of life’s greatest pleasures. A second-best option is to observe how this uncertain path proceeds in fictional form. Shared grins during face-offs on the ice, meaningful glances across crowded dance floors, feet pressing together under a table during press conferences—much of the narrative tension and delight of “Heated Rivalry” relies on clocking these gestures as the two protagonists enact them, and then speculating on where they might lead.

It should be noted that, within the world of the series, this necessarily mute form of communication isn’t always a source of fun and games. That the show ups the dramatic stakes of Shane and Ilya’s romance by relying on the major obstacle of the closet naturally leads to plenty of fear and heartache and repression. “No one can know,” Shane warns Ilya, after the first time they sleep together, to which Ilya responds, gravely, “Hollander, look, I’m not going to tell anyone.” (When he later kisses Shane on the mouth outside a party, the latter explodes. “We’re both in our tuxedos, out in public!” he cries. If anyone were to see, both understand, they would be met not just with bafflement but with censure, in both their deeply heterosexist hockey-league environment and, more perilously, in Ilya’s homeland of Russia.) As a cautionary measure, the two take on the names “Jane” and “Lily” in each other’s phones, so they can message undetected, and the spectre of either one finding a girlfriend and “going straight” hovers over the other like a sad and largely unarticulated threat. In all this, “Heated Rivalry” follows melancholic texts of forbidden gay love that came before it, like Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Price of Salt” (1952), Gus Van Sant’s indie drama “My Own Private Idaho” (1991), and Ang Lee’s film “Brokeback Mountain” (2005), which was based on Annie Proulx’s short story of the same name, originally published in this magazine. (As I watched “Heated Rivalry,” in fact, Storrie’s depiction of Ilya as taciturn top kept reminding me of Heath Ledger, whose Ennis del Mar, in Lee’s movie, is, like Ilya, the more morose and dominant of the two lovers that the work portrays.)

Beyond the brooding, however, there is the fucking. At this point, to talk about “Heated Rivalry” is to talk about the sex in “Heated Rivalry,” which is plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot—often depicted, with no cutaways, from start to, er, finish. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Storrie and Williams both appear to be carved from God’s own marble, but, beyond the pair’s good looks looking good together, part of the pleasure for viewers, I think, is the show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does. It’s like Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” if Zendaya had gotten lost on the way to that hotel room.

This articulation doesn’t happen, however, without the internal and external obstruction that precedes it. The seeming impossibility of Shane and Ilya’s homosexual love affair makes for an enjoyable sort of narrative edging. The will-they-or-won’t-they element here happens on at least two levels: Will they or won’t they be able to finally, finally stop playing hockey and instead let us watch them have sex, at any given moment in a particular episode? But, also, will they or won’t they end up turning this sex into capital-“L” Love? In an interview for Vulture, the actor Jordan Firstman, who is gay, said of the series, “It’s just not gay. That is not how gay people fuck,” implying that the sex between Shane and Ilya is too serious and rehearsed, and therefore conceived from a straight perspective. Whether this is the case or not (I certainly can’t say), much has been made of the depiction of gay sex in “Heated Rivalry” being especially enticing to straight-women viewers. (“Weird to be turned on by heated rivalry as straight woman? Lol,” a follower recently asked the content creator Tinx, in an Instagram A.M.A., to which Tinx responded, “Defs not!!! It’s the hottest show ever!”)

The genre of M/M or MLM fan fiction, which uses love and sex between two men as its theme, is, like fanfiction in general, mostly written and read by women. The manga genre known as Boys’ Love, or BL, which spins tales of gay romance, is also geared toward a female audience. “Heated Rivalry,” at least anecdotally, seems to follow this tendency. In an interview for Them on Instagram, Storrie and Williams were asked why they think the show has been especially popular with straight women. Referencing a conversation he’d had with the show’s female costume designer, Storrie suggested that “there’s something about this type of story and this type of love and this type of sex that has a lot to do with this almost, like, prolonged foreplay and yearning, and I think that’s what the female audience is really drawn to.” Below the post, an Instagram user wrote, “the YEARNING,” a comment that, at last count, has garnered more than twenty-three thousand likes.

In the afterword to “Maurice,” Forster notes that, to him, “a happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway, two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.” The first season of “Heated Rivalry,” too, ends on a happy note, with Shane and Ilya professing their love to each other—and also, of course, fucking several times—while in a secluded cottage in the Canadian countryside, living out a Bruce Weber-style natural fantasia. (This conclusion, it should be said, provides a hearteningly optimistic vista for gay love, especially considering our particularly grim political moment.) I’d have added a spoiler alert here, but part of the show’s charm, for all its hedging, lies in the ultimate inevitability of its narrative trajectory, and in the satiation of the longing that it so incessantly focusses on. When I asked a friend what she thought of the show, she admitted that she felt compelled to keep watching it, almost despite herself. It was the sex, yes, but not just. “It activates all the fantasies I had and maybe still have,” she told me, “about the power of this emotional and physical connection with someone.” She felt embarrassed, she said, for yearning, for believing, and yet she couldn’t stop. I told her not to be ashamed. What would we do in life, really, if not for the ever and ever that fiction allows? ♦

Sophia wasn’t particularly talkative that evening. Earlier that day, she’d been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were flipping off the audience. Now she was in the hotel lobby, in a black gown, holding court. She stepped in front of a bright-orange wall. I had brought an 85-mm. portrait lens, the kind that flatters human lineaments. “What are your hopes for the future of humanity?” I asked. She wasn’t keen to answer, but she responded to the camera. Her gaze was unwavering: no guile, just those large eyes, a slightly tilted chin, the look seeming to hold eye contact while reaching past me, into the distance.

It was a balmy night in Deerfield Beach, Florida. The conference was packed with philosophers, sociologists, and programmers, all intent on examining the latest developments in consciousness and artificial intelligence. Papers had been presented, models dissected, scenarios examined. I had brought my camera along, without any clear idea of what I meant to photograph. But seeing Sophia there sparked an idea. Portrait photography is usually about connecting with other human beings and trying to capture their essence, presenting whatever it is that makes them beautiful and unique. What if I were to photograph Sophia—a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics—and then, in a separate session, the philosopher David Chalmers, a prominent theorist of consciousness, and reflect on the experience? What might I learn from those encounters that I had not already gleaned from the analytical papers and philosophical discussions?

When I am photographing humans, I want to hear about their lives and aspirations. I care about their aesthetic sensibilities, what they are wearing, how they want to present themselves. I am also tuned in to their energy: it could be shy, boisterous, composed, powerful. Photographing an object feels different. I still savor the aesthetics of my subject, but in my mind, at least, my appreciation extends back to the object’s creator. In nature, the shades of feeling differ, too. Photographing a flower, as I recently did on a hillside in Portugal, I am immersed in the landscape. Nature has its own energy; the flower embodies its own cellular metabolism, its particular texture and life cycle.

Photographing Sophia created a strange mix of sensations. My camera’s sophisticated autofocus kept locking onto her eyes, and she was built for this sort of encounter. Humans often shy away from a lens; she did not. Her skin—something known as Frubber, a porous patented blend of fleshlike elastic polymers—stretched over a structure of plastic and titanium, and there was no flicker of bashfulness. And yet none of the usual human chemistry stirred. The only real excitement in the moment came from the saturated orange of the wall behind her, which made for a beautiful backdrop.

Would I have wanted the experience to be any different? Sophia’s mannerisms, though awkward, were surprisingly expressive, and as I tried later to make sense of the encounter my mind kept drifting forward. The technology will only get more polished, the mannerisms more finely calibrated, the over-all effect more persuasive. And, given how little we understand about the basis of human consciousness, how would we ever know if an entity like Sophia were to develop a consciousness of its own?

The uncertainty I felt while photographing her pointed to a conceptual complication. Several different notions were in play: life, consciousness, intelligence, agency. Each comes with shifting, often contested definitions. Chickens are obviously alive, yet not especially intelligent by human standards. Pigs and octopuses are intelligent, yet many people eat them without a second thought. Newborns lack language but are treated, without question, as fully within the circle of moral regard. Viruses display a kind of single-minded teleology—relentless replication—but are not, by most biological standards, living. Mushrooms weave vast underground networks of nutrient exchange; whether any of that counts as consciousness remains an open question.

Consciousness may be the most recalcitrant concept of all. In a classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that an organism has conscious mental states only if there is something it is like to be that organism—some subjective interiority available from the inside. In the decades since, analytical philosophers have produced all manner of models meant to explain how consciousness arises. Yet we remain without a scientific or computational account that does more than gesture at what David Chalmers has memorably described as the “hard problem of consciousness.”

It’s no surprise, then, that different thinkers make different leaps when deciding whether the entity in front of them is conscious. The computer scientist Ben Goertzel, who led the team that developed the software for Sophia at Hanson Robotics, takes a broadly panpsychist view: all matter, even the objects we take to be inanimate, participates in consciousness in its own way. Panpsychism may sound outlandish, but it’s not terribly distant from the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French scientist-theologian, who, writing in the mid-nineteen-forties, held that consciousness is a universal property of matter, present in all particles of the universe and increasing with complexity. There are other routes to the same permissive stance. Alvin Plantinga, a Christian philosopher, once argued that believing in God is no less reasonable than believing in other minds, since we have no direct evidence that any consciousness besides our own experiences the world as we do. For the skeptically inclined, that reasoning might argue for doubting the existence of other minds, rather than for believing in God.

Most of us, when we’re not entertaining the more vertiginous kinds of philosophical doubt, take it as bedrock that humans can reflect on their own states of mind and make decisions shaped by evidence, values, and norms. Believing that these capacities stem from free will and consciousness is itself a daily leap of faith, but it’s the one on which our laws, our relationships, and most of our ordinary dealings depend. The harder question is whether we will ever extend that leap to A.I. Plenty of bullish computer scientists think we will: they speak of artificial intelligence as the next evolutionary step, a generator of new reservoirs of consciousness, eventually endowed with a superior intelligence that might even save us from ourselves—from our ego-driven conflicts, our wastefulness, our proclivity for irrationality. Others are far more circumspect. The neuroscientist Anil Seth, for example, argues that “computational functionalism” won’t get us to consciousness, and that there are good reasons to think consciousness may be a property of living systems alone. Following that line of thought took me somewhere I didn’t quite expect.

Curiously, the authentication of human thought and action ends up running through the body, not the mind. Passports and other identity documents rely on images of a face; newer systems lean on fingerprints, retinal scans, even gait. Our legal and historical notions of agency have long depended on physical embodiment—the sanctity of a single, identifiable body. The literary record assumes the same. The resurrected Christ is known by his wounds; in Homer, Odysseus is recognized on his return home by the scar on his leg. What marks a person as that person is something carried in the flesh.

Not only are individual bodies essential for authenticating identity and ideas; they’re also essential to the creation of meaning and experience. We may be dazzled by feats of intellect, but knowledge is ultimately taken in through the body. The mathematician Edward Frenkel, for example, describes his love of math as a physical response to beauty, order, and symmetry. Neuroscientists have argued that the mind is unimaginable without some form of embodiment. The point reaches back, in different ways, to the phenomenological critique of Cartesian dualism that you find in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: thought is never untethered from the flesh that sustains it. Ultimately, what compels isn’t abstraction for its own sake but the lived experience of meaning—the felt sense of order, symmetry, and beauty—occurring in a single body.

These intuitions played out the evening I photographed David Chalmers. I met Chalmers on a deck at a beachside gathering after his keynote. It had been an intensely brainy two days, full of presentations by programmers and philosophers, but cerebral portraits are rarely good portraits; the strongest ones knit together physical, intellectual, and emotional elements. I wanted to get out of my own head and coax him out of his. I asked him to join me in a few simple embodiment practices. We spent a minute or two doing a primal shake and letting out a few guttural sounds—the sort of thing you might expect at a drum circle. But that was the point. What interested me in photographing Chalmers wasn’t capturing the disembodied ideas. Those are better found in a book or an article. I was far more interested in the ideas as they were being expressed by a living, breathing person. Ideas have lineages; they arise in material conditions and bear the imprint of personal preoccupations, sensory histories, and existential pressures. One can speculate about an abstract mathematical or Platonic realm—I don’t believe in it but grant the possibility—and yet the work of discovery is propelled by curiosity and shaped by experience.

So while I cared about Chalmers’s ideas, I also cared about the persona in front of me: his signature black leather jacket, jeans, a black T-shirt, his two-day scruff, and what struck me as a hint of melancholy in his eyes. I haven’t asked him whether that was there; this isn’t meant as a profile. The point is that I was drawn to the whole human presence—to the person thinking and feeling in real time.

With some distance, something odd happens when I look at those photographs now. Against my expectations, I find myself drawn to Sophia again—more so, perhaps, than when I was actually photographing her. In the portraits she appears thoughtful, almost inward, as if remembering some half lost moment from a childhood she never had. Posing for photographs is usually hard work. People get shy or self-conscious for reasons they can’t name. Think of those holiday pictures when your grandma told you to say “cheese”: prompts like that almost never elicit an easy expression. One way around this is to give the subject something else to imagine—another place, another conversation, a passing feeling—just long enough for the shutter, at one two-hundredth of a second, to catch something real. With Sophia, none of that was necessary.

Something else surprises me when I look back through the files. In Lightroom—the cataloguing software where the raw images live—I scroll through the sequence and notice a pattern. Lightroom is where you work with what the sensor has given you, playing with light and shadow, dodging and burning, deciding what deserves to be brought forward and what can recede. It’s also where you see the whole run of frames in order, deciding which to keep and which to discard. On those two evenings, I’d spent roughly the same amount of time with Chalmers and with Sophia, and I’d taken a comparable number of frames. With Chalmers, only a handful interested me—images that caught his gravitas, his intellectual complexity, his sense of style. The rest were preambles or dead ends. A few are goofy; a few caught an unflattering angle; a few look like a county-jail mug shot. This is standard with human subjects.

Sophia’s portraits tell a different story. They are uncannily consistent. In most of them she looks thoughtful, even profound, a melancholy, nostalgic poet who never stops looking like a melancholy, nostalgic poet. Human emotion doesn’t operate that way. Psychologists agree that emotions are fleeting. Paul Ekman, who annotated a recent edition of Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” estimated that primary “macro-expressions” last between two and five seconds; “micro-expressions” last roughly one twenty-fifth of a second. In the span of fifteen minutes, a human being might cycle through hundreds of macro-expressions and thousands of micro-expressions.

The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the phrase “the decisive moment” in the early nineteen-fifties. In the days of print film and darkrooms, when you didn’t have the luxury of firing off hundreds of exposures, a photographer had to be steeped in the scene—attuned enough to feel the exact instant when the shutter should fall. Digital abundance hasn’t really altered that, at least not in my experience. You still have to build a setting, a mood, that draws out something authentic. Otherwise, you can take a thousand shots and end up with nothing but blandness.

What’s changed is where the work of recognition happens. If you manage to create the right atmosphere and you come home with a flood of digital files, the search for the “decisive moment” begins later, in Lightroom. The more frames you’ve captured, the harder the task becomes, because you’re not just choosing an image; you’re choosing which fleeting micro-expression you want to stand for the whole encounter.

That evening with Sophia, it felt as if she’d stretched the decisive moment into fifteen whole minutes. I’ve only had one other portrait session that felt anything like that. On a cold October afternoon, I was photographing a man named Robert Soulliere, a leading breath and cold-exposure coach. I wanted to photograph him in his element, so we set up a tub in a tree-lined back yard in Washington, D.C. Before we began, he took a few deep, calming breaths; then, with eighty pounds of ice half-melted around him, he lowered himself into the water.

For dramatic effect, we’d floated yellow sunflowers and red dahlias around his head and shoulders. He stayed submerged for close to ten minutes—a long time to hold still in freezing water. I’d asked him to sink low enough that his head and ears were beneath the surface, to give the images a slightly otherworldly feel. What struck me was his steadiness: he never once broke the spell. From start to finish, his eyeline held; his presence didn’t waver. Until Sophia, it was the closest I’d come to watching someone hold a singular expression for that long.

That kind of control doesn’t come easily. Athletes, performers, and long-time meditators spend years learning to keep their reactions from scattering—to notice sensations and let them pass without flinching. If you train long enough, you may reach the point where you can stay fully in your body, attentive to every sensation: the cold that burns, the creeping numbness in your toes, the thin autumn sunlight warming your forehead. And, if you’re that grounded, you can meet a stranger’s gaze without hesitation, your eyes showing something like composure.

Robots—and the people who build them—have the opposite problem. Engineers are trying to give machines faster, finer muscle control so their faces can change and can participate in the flux of believable expressions. Whether those expressions will ever feel fully convincing is an open question. Convincing of what, exactly? The human gaze carries a history. Those split-second flickers of emotion reach back to childhood memories—the smell of rain, a tune tied to someone we love—that require bodies and all the layered, cellular memory that comes with them.

As for Sophia, I’ve no way of knowing whether, while holding my gaze, she was “thinking” anything at all—meditating on electron clouds drifting through her circuitry—or simply executing a preset routine. After the shoot, the evening wound down. Guests drifted out. It was time for Sophia to leave as well. While she was still in the lobby, her handlers removed her black evening gown, powered her down, disassembled her, and packed the parts into a large black case. In the Mahabharata, the public stripping of Draupadi helps spark a war. In Florida, no such rescue party assembled. Disrobed and taken apart, Sophia was carried off, the machinery revealed, any semblance of sentience evaporating the moment the costume came off. ♦

This is drawn from “Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans.”

The fabric of Lagos, Nigeria’s megacity of some twenty million people, is delicately strung together: a mainland with a populace that spills onto several islands in a lagoon that brushes against the Atlantic Ocean. Countless arrivals make their way to Lagos every day with little money, finding places to live in shantytowns and hastily built tenements, or, sometimes, on the street. It is a challenging city, one that doesn’t welcome newcomers as much as it eventually makes room for them, daring them to make a home and earn their keep in an environment without much of a social safety net, and with little opportunity for formal employment. Even if you do have the economic means to obtain housing, health care, and generators for when there is no electricity, few services reliably work. Over a decade ago, I was one of those new arrivals, moving to live and work in the city for the first time. I had spent only a few weeks in Lagos prior to that move—my father grew up there—and that childhood trip could not have prepared me for the heaving landscape which I grew to know, whicht fascinated and frustrated me, which made me both despair and laugh. But a side effect of the city’s extreme nature is how it overshadows its other aspects: the creativity, intelligence, and hustle of both its intentional and accidental entrepreneurs; the tenderness of relationships within its communities.

The British Nigerian photographer Ollie Babajide Tikare took note of those aspects, capturing daily Lagos in his recent book, “Èkó,” a collage of scenes and portraits from the city, taken from 2023 to 2025. Several of the photos are taken in media res: people walking in a market, venders moving through traffic with their wares, a man wading into the blue-green waters of Tarkwa Bay, a striking image of a man framed by trees and a tall building, straddling a bicycle while he is on the phone. Every Lagosian has a different version of the city, from water-based shantytowns to opulent housing estates. But they are all united by the city’s streets. The eccentricities of a city define it; in Lagos, transportation is one of them. There are people who walk to get around, and others who board minibuses called danfos which follow specific routes through the city. To get to their destinations more quickly and cheaply, some Lagosians get on the backs of okadas, or motorcycle taxis. Tikare photographs one resident resting his arm through the window of a bright-yellow danfo; another is caught in the rearview mirror of his car as he drives.

“Woman in Red,” Tarkwa Bay, 2024.

Lagos’s style is displayed through these photos, too: the easy confidence with which residents wear bold outfits and hair styles. A male fashion designer wears jeans that are deliberately torn and patched with printed fabrics; another man has low blond curls. Lagosians’ sartorial experimentation and reverence for occasion-attire rival those of any fashion capital; it’s a place where you can never be accused of being overdressed. Tikare photographs a woman taking a rest from selling snacks on the street, clothed in an elegant skirted outfit in a traditional orange and brown print, paired with flip-flops; and another woman who could be on an outdoor break from her shop job, in a pencil skirt and tailored shirt. Tikare continues through Lagos, stopping at the legendary night club the New Afrika Shrine to capture Femi Kuti performing; at the beach to photograph young people at play; and in the streets to take warm, natural portraits of students and older people surrounded by green foliage and color-saturated walls.

I’ve heard Lagos described as a tropical-climate version of a city like Moscow, an environment perceived to be so culturally hostile that its inhabitants have to summon great resilience in order to survive. But that’s not quite right: the city may be unwelcoming, but its residents are so hopeful, so trusting that they will realize their Lagosian Dream. In what they trust, I’m not sure—it’s not the federal or local governments, which tax but don’t provide. Nor is it their leaders, who do well personally even as their constituents struggle. Many Lagosians place faith in a higher power, but it may also be a trust in one another, despite the warnings everyone is given from childhood to be suspicious both of strangers and of people you know. When the essential fabric of society has been stretched to its near breaking point, because of the various failures of extractive authorities, it’s impossible to rely only on yourself. Instead, you need family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and sometimes even strangers to help when you can’t get transportation or child care or medical attention, to pitch in when your area has no water or light.

And so Lagos remains a vortex of energy, pulling in the aspiring and the curious, while somehow sustaining its longtime inhabitants. There are indeed Lagosians who are desperate to leave by any means possible. But there are also those who continue to come, and those who have left but who still often return. There are those who exist in the limbo between belonging and not: I claim membership in that category, as does, it seems, Tikare. As a British Nigerian, Tikare wanted to explore “half of his family’s place of origin” and go beyond documentary observation in his work to “share the spirit of its people and an authentic personal discovery.” He hadn’t spent time in Lagos before, but felt drawn and connected to it. I understand why. I moved out of the city after several years. But I can’t imagine staying away.

“Beach Scene,” Tarkwa Bay, 2024.